Once Upon a Dream
by Black-Cat-Max
Summary: This is an unfinished piece in the world of Mega Man X: Command Mission. Meant as an exploration of the Reploid as a living being, maybe too philosophical for its own good. This may start a project, I'm not sure. I'm marking it "complete" just because, well, if I haven't added to it in over ten years it's probably never going to happen, truth be told. But if you're game, welcome.


Nana was a very good navigator. Not the highest ranked in government official test logs, but more than competant for work above and beyond normal duty. It was why R had picked her for his staff, and why she was able to sit where she was now, at the helm of the Resistance command console, monitoring what feeds she could get of the away team's next destination.

It was also how she kept her diagnostics from constantly spamming her vision with warnings, leftovers from her enslavement to the Rebellion under Silver Horn. The things he'd done to her... The damage to her endoskeleton and exoframe had been fixed handily enough by the automated systems in the base's repair bay - in no more than an hour or two the damage wrought by being stepped on but a Maverick weighing maybe a dozen tons was replaced and refitted to the point where you'd never have known that anything happened.

Not if you looked at the ~outside~. All of her internal systems were still full of noise, leftovers from her forced adaptation to the interface she'd been Frankenstein'd into in order to run the Rebellion mainframe. It'd been a hostile system, permitted to jack her neural network while most of her processing power was being chewed up trying to remain conscious while being squeezed in a hand almost as big as her entire body. It was going to take a lot of time to get everything sorted back out again.

Time she didn't have just then. She was still within operating capacity, and there was too heavy a data load to get through before the next mission to take any down time. After all, she was one of the best.

All this excess thought on top of all else is why it took several paging blips on her heads-up before she acknowledged the incoming message originating from the repair bay where their newest additions to the group had been. She opened the channel and closed her eyes, taking a calming breath her Reploid body really didn't need.

"Go ahead Professor."

Instead of the highly capable and intelligent platypus, however, a young girl's face topped with a red and white helmet appeared in the miniature video window. The same face she'd seen once her repairs had been done and her optics had come back online. Said face gave a soft smile that looked much more convincing than a Reploid face should have been able to. "Actually, it's me."

"Oh." She gave her head a slight shake."Sorry, Cinnamon. I just assumed..."

"It's okay. I just wanted to check on you. How are you feeling? You looked a little stiff when you left with the new lateral support bar. I read the details for Navigator body types over and over, but I still don't know if I got it completely right."

"It's not a problem. Since I'm not a combat unit, it won't get in the way of my function. How are the rest of the team faring after the battle?"

Cinnamon's head turned to the side for a moment. "X, Massimo and Marino are resting on standby, Chief R is in his office, and the professor is running simulations on possible new Force Metal designs. I suppose you could say everything is peaceful for now."

"Good." Nana switched a series of video windows about, security feeds from all around the base and a few sattelite scans of the areas they'd gotten done clearing out not a few hours ago. There were also a few repaired Mechaniloids scavenging for whatever they could find in one area that X had dispatched them to earlier - they would be returning in an hour or two. Between ignoring the nearly-constant error warnings from her interface system and all of this input, she all but forgot about the open communications channel until Cinnamon reminded her.

"Do you have time to come back to the bay? I know you wanted me to wait to do the diagnostics on your core systems, but we should really do it soon in case there's any instability."

"I'm fine, Cinnamon. It can wait until later." Her spare processor cycles took the time these words required to swat down another half-dozen insistent error messages from her interface protocols. "I'm performing just fine."

"Are you sure? I'm reading some static in your transmissions."

"Probably just the repairs done to the command console after Jango was beaten but before I was rescued."

"But I already know from what I read about your design schematics that your internal systems have superior communications capability, meaning that the console's master control program would automatically delegate that function to you rather than handling things itself."

That gave Nana pause. Enough pause for another dozen messages to overlay on her vision, until weighing her options left her with the realization that it would probably take less time to get the problem diagnosed and fixed, would give her ~back~ all the system cycles involuntarily used to produce the messages, and overall it would get her back to ~real~ full operating capacity. Which, really, was highly important to a Navigator. She ~was~ compromising her performance, and in the end there was no point in that when it wasn't completely necessary. And if what Cinnamon said was true and all was peaceful for the time being, then it really wasn't.

"Okay. I'll be right there."

She sent a memo to the Chief, password-locked the command console, and stood from the chair, her newly-repaired frame making absolutely no sound. Dedicating the processor cycles no longer being used for monitoring to redouble efforts against the error messages, she exited the command room for the repair bay.

Cinnamon was sitting at the repair bay's main display screen when the door slid open, and turned with a small smile when Nana entered. "Welcome. Would you like to have a seat on the bed?"

"Thanks", came the reply as the Navigator sat on the large table-like object in the center of the bay. "Where's Professor Gaudille?"

"He took the air bus down below to search the shops for some parts he said he needed. He should be back in a while." She stood from her chair, stepped closer, and swept her hand around Nana's head, an inch or two away. "From the way your stride looked as you walked in, I think your repairs are working well enough. Am I right?"

"I... well..." More messages were emerging - aside from warnings about her input and output systems, warnings that filtered into her virtual mind as ~fear~ began to emerge as she noted, feature by feature, the resemblance between the "bed" she sat on and the seat in the depths of Silver Horn's base where she'd been restrained and forced into serving him, tracking the Hunters as they progressed through the base. SHe redirected even more cycles to countermanding the warnings, and her face reflexively settled into an unpleasant look.

"I see..." Cinnamon held her hands up beside Nana's ears. "I think I know what this is, let me try to help."

"What're you going to-"

She was handily cut off as a resonating tone sounded in her audio pickups. Her subsystems processed it instantly, and before it was even routed for processing it quickly twisted into the link to her consciousness and disabled the function that interpreted error messages into the feeling of fear. The effect was immediate, and Nana's facade lightened. If a Reploid could be left breathless, she would have been. "How... how did you do that?"

"Part of my medical programming", Cinnamon answered with the smile she might as well have trademarked. "I can disable the feeds of pain, fear, and other things that would interfere with diagnosis."

"~Impressive~."

"Thank you." She stood back and gestured. "Would you lie down please?"

Nana did so. Her body settled easily into the padded bed, the same spot where X and the rest of them would lie while damage from a mission was fixed to save their internal repair systems the time and energy. While the fear had been handily silenced, the error messages regarding her inputs were still bothersomely spamming her vision. She closed her eyes and focused the optical subsystems on keeping the messages locked out. Fortunately, it worked. Again reflexively, she sighed in relief.

"That sounds good."

"It feels a little better too."

"Glad to hear it." Cinnamon tapped a few keys on the bed's interface screen, and held her hands out over her patient. "I'm going to run a perfunctory scan now, just to be on the safe side. Just so you know, Marino says it tickles a little."

It didn't tickle, exactly, but Nana's eyes snapped instantly open as the bed's diagnostic system stimulated her sense of touch. It was like a wave or cold going from head to foot, followed by a wave of heat. Her limbs quivered involuntarily. It was a decidedly odd experience, one that had never been a part of the government's regular maintenance operations.

"Sensorymotor feedback twitches, okay, I think that's what's supposed to happen. Let's move on to the other senses." The medical Reploid lowered one hand, while the other hovered above her patient's head.

A few more keystrokes followed. Nana smelled a variety of things from food to smoke to floral scents, heard a variety of tones that spanned the entire spectrum of sound her pickups could register, and her vision temporarily swam with rotating patterns of color and light of millions of hues and different intensities. It would have been prettier but for those ~error messages~.

"Well, it seems your senses are all fine. If it's okay, I'll link up and check on your core functions and subsystems. Will you give me access?"

"Okay. But I'm not sure you'll like what you find." She toggled a setting, and one of the cranial IO ports that let the base's central console connect to her irised open in the lower back of her head. "It's been, well, really noisy in there since..."

"It's okay. I'm sure I'll be fine." Cinnamon's left forearm split along a pair of lateral seams, and the large white exoframe opened, permitting a dozen or so thin spider-like extensions bearing as many different tools to expand outward. "I'm going to connect to you directly to do the evaluation, since my own systems are a little mroe specialized than the bed's."

Nana's mouth formed a half-smile. "So that's why the professor made your arms so large."

The medical reploid hesitated, then returned the look. "Well, really, it's no different from your advanced processors and memory. I was simply constructed to suit my purpose. We didn't have much in the way of a medical bay at the laboratory, so he designed me not to need one."

"So you could do this anywhere, like in the field?"

"If I needed to I guess, but the base's support computers help a lot with things I don't already have knowledge of. Okay, I'm going to try accessing your diagnostics." One of the small arms from beneath her outer covering extended, and the data plug on it connected to Nana's IO port. She put a low-grade firewall in place around her own virtual mind for procedure's sake, and requested access to the host system, Nana's base system architecture. The security burped up some strange sort of message, which she logged, before clicking off. And that was when the ~blaring~ started. Error messages began showing up in her vision, logging a wide variety of mismatched drivers, infected memory sectors, and well... to put it mildly, a disturbing proportion of Nana's subsystems were in completel disarray. It was a wonder that anything was still operational, let alone that there'd been no outward signs. Her firewall held up, but back behind it she grimaced.

Nana closed her eyes and groaned. "It's bad, isn't it?"

"I've never seen anything like this before. You have resource conflicts, corrupted sectors, diagnostics that are locked out and trying to break through their own firewalls... oh my..."

"See now why I was worried about letting you link up?"

Cinnamon gave her head a little shake for little to no reason, and immediately put her usual smile back in place. All her files suggested it was very important to maintain a professional and calm demeanor in the face of serious situations. "Well, luckily since you're a Navigator the burden is something your core can handle... if it were X or maybe Zero having this sort of thing their brains would probably lock up and go into a complete crash."

Well, ~that~ was heartening.

"But still", the medical Reploid continued, "with all of this going on beneath your virtual environment I'm amazed you can even speak. I... I have an idea what to do, but let me look into the bay's system tools bfore I commit anything to it."

Nana's susroutines, spammed as they were, still managed to output a sigh. "Don't worry, I'm not going anywhere." The response was halfhearted and she knew it, but with Cinnamon's disabling effect still keeping her from feeling any fear, she found it much easier to keep a grip on things with that one less process to eat up resources.

Cinnamon disconnected her direct link to Nana's IO port, and instead connected it to the repair bay bed's extension cable. A few nanoseconds negotiating with its simple logic, and she accessed its list of possible functions. Everything that she'd seen in her brief peek into Nana's subsystems ~looked~ like the bed could handle them, but it would obviously take some time. However, as she'd said, Nana was a Navigator and as such had vastly greater system resources than other Reploids - she probably wouldn't need to be offline even for such extensive work, but obviously something would have to be devised. She matched it against the backlog of capabilities she herself had, and against her experiences from helping take care of her creator and the small handful of Mechanaloids that operated in and about the laboratory. A few options came to mind, and she nodded. "Okay. I think I know what to do."

Nana lifted her head and permitted herself half a smile amid the error messages."You can fix me?" Yes it'd been a relief when the away team had returned more or less safely, and it'd been good to use a console not trying to break ~through~ her mind to operate, but this was the first really uplifting thing she'd heard all day.

"I'm sure of it. Just try to relax, okay?" She approached the bed again, connected its cable to Nana, and stepped to its control screen. "This might feel a little weird."

For a moment or two artificial fear returned - messages detecting an unknown outside system began appearing too, but by this point they were all but lost amid the others still insistently proclaiming the need for a wide variety of diagnostic and repair tools to be run. Every sensory input pinged her core processor, every subsystem momentarily blinked to life, and even her Navigator-grade resources began to strain - yet more warnings added to the plethora. Memories of being forcefully connected to Silver Horn's base operating chair returned too, and it was finally all she could manage. A number of subroutines activated, unfamiliar but almost definitely geared toward system shutdown. With nothing more to divert into countering the errors or refuting stray command lines, everything hiccupped, and there was oblivion.

N.O.M. Medical Work Station Model Number FF-1337

Copyright (c) 2215, 2219, 2225 N.O.M. Corporation All Rights Reserved

Real Memory: 10666 TB Available Memory: 10024 TB

Primary Cache: 7384 GB Primary Load: 7144 GB Secondary Cache: 5120 GB

Login: GENERIC-0001 Password: ********

Running Primary Input Scan Client System Detected - Model NAVI/OPER-7777

Calibrating Virtual Environment Calibrating System Tools

Client System Uplink Engaged System Diagnostic/Repair Sequence Started 19:23:14

Nana opened her eyes.

No more error messages, no more feelings of concern or fear. She sat at the command console in the base's control room, the same data she'd seen dozens of times in the line of duty scrolling peacefully across the screens. Everything was quiet, it was all under control. She felt remarkably normal. What a relief.

Normal, that is, until she actively attempted to access her subroutines and take a look at where everything was in terms of system load. Instead of her consciousness disengaging and permitting her direct BIOS access, one of the screens in front of her blipped and showed a series of statistics and a sub-window with a diagnostic readout and progress bar. Mind still very much engaged and ~curious~, she looked at the screen. The one beside it noted that someone was entering the room, and she turned as a door slid open and Cinnamon came walking in.

"Well?" As always, the medical Reploid was looking cheerful. SHe stopped beside the command chair and stood. "How do you feel?"

"I feel just fine... I think." Fine was kind of an overstatement - curiosity turned to concern as she regarded the diagnostic window and noted that one of the text lines included what she knew to be her own Reploid model number, assigned when she first came online years ago. "What did you do?"

"Well, it's complicated..." Cinnamon poked the tips of her index fingers together and looked down. "See, your core systems needed a ~lot~ of work... enough that anyone else who needed it would have needed to go completely offline. But suspending the virtual mind of a Reploid is a long and complex process, and rebooting is even more so, and so instead I thought I'd try something a little different. You know how the systems of a repair capsule engage the Reploid brain and occupy the system's idle processor cycles and sensory inputs with simulations so complete shutdown isn't necessary?"

"And so we dream, right?" Of course one of the many things Reploids could do was read and mimic the kind of body language humans used - and Nana noted that the motions Cinnamon was making that moment were definitely geared to be cute - and thusly disarming. Idly, she wondered if Dr. Gaudille had written that in on purpose or if Cinnamon herself had decided to make use of it. In either case, she hoped it didn't mean she was about to get some bad news.

"Right, exactly. Well, your core systems were burdened to the limit when interfacing with the repair bed's systems was added to all the errors and driver conflicts and tools trying to fix the problems with the tools trying to fix the errors, and... well, I decided to re-route your consciousness to the bed's processors while it tapped yours and used them to run the repairs. Its programming includes specifications for rendering a virtual environment that's peaceful, so the subject can relax during the process." She lifted her head and looked around. "I guess it must think you're comfortable at the command console."

Suddenly it made sense. Nana gestured to the monitor screen that had come to life when she tried checking on herself. "So when I asked my own interface to show me a status report, the repair bed responded with its own." She paused to regard it. "Looks like it might take a while."

"It will, but since the tests are being run on your own processing power, it should take a much shorter time. You're a Navigator, and so your core should have a much larger data path to devote to the whole thing. Of course right now your ~mind~ is running on the repair bed's internal resources, which means you'll be a lot more limited. That's why I wanted to connect myself, to keep an eye on things. And of course to answer your questions. Dr. Gaudille says it's very important to pay attention to detail."

So there would be some time to kill. That was okay, she was accustomed to lengthy hours sitting in this same seat. Well, the seat of which this was a simulation. But since Reploid consciousness was also sort of an abstract thing, that was really just splitting hairs. She made to pull up the screen for the Mechanaloid deployment system. Since she wouldn't be deploying a ~real~ team she'd get nothing from it, but at least it would be something to do while she waited for the diagnostics and such to finish. "It's okay", she replied. "I promise I'll be fine."

She ~would~ have been, too, if not for a little confusion as the screen that displayed the Mechanaloid Deployment Interface came up, but failed to respond to any of her commands. She tried a second time and a third, in both cases getting absolutely no reaction from it. It was the right thing on the display, it just didn't seem to be ~doing~ anything. It gave her a moment's pause, then she put a hand to her forehead. "...right, it's not the real command console, it's just a simulation. I know what the screen looks like but not how it actually works, and neither does the repair bed."

Cinnamon gave her a nod. "While we're in this simulation, all we can really interact with is what we know. But on the good side, it's not bound by the usual laws of reality. So if you wanted to pass the time by walking around on the ceiling or floating around in the air, it's possible, even without advanced additional hardware."

If nothing else, Nana had to admit the environment ~was~ in fact pretty comfortable. To whit, the chair even felt softer than she was used to. Was that actually how her memory had logged the pressure of her weight, or was something in her imagination embellising things? She decided that at the moment it really didn't matter. "You sound like you've got a lot of experience with these things."

"I do. It's how Dr. Gaudille trained me to be a medic."

"Trained you?"

"Well", Cinnamon turned halfway to look at the sim-room's biggest screen as she spoke. "The doctor is a great inventor, and he figured out that the best way to build his Force Metal Generator would be to build it into a Reploid body, where it would be inconspicuous. But even though he can design and build things like the generator, he's really not that good at programming. All he managed was to copy a blank Reploid mind into my body. He copied all kinds of medical and repair procedures into my memory, and then through interactive simulations he talked to me and let me develop into who I am."

"...I've never heard of a Reploid being created that way."

"I haven't either... it's one of the reasons I'm so happy I got the chance to meet everyone here. I've learned so much about all of you that it's amazing."

"...because every Reploid is different in a lot of ways, no matter how similar the models are at inception, right?"

Cinnamon nodded. "That's right. Because like our human forerunners, we grow and change on our own."  



End file.
